In the early 2010s, Jeff Bezos had a fairly specific obsession.
Preventing Amazon from becoming a slow, bureaucratic, complacent company.
Bezos was convinced that many organizations began to deteriorate at the very moment they stopped acting with a startup mindset.
And that, according to him, was where the problem began.
Inside Amazon, Bezos spoke of two concepts.
Day 1 and Day 2.
For him, “Day 1” represented the energy of a company that still moves fast, constantly questions itself and acts with urgency.
“Day 2”, on the other hand, was exactly the opposite. Slowness, comfort and the start of a gradual decline.
Over time, that idea became one of the most important narratives of Amazon’s culture.
“It’s always Day 1.”
The phrase began to appear in offices, meetings and internal communications as a way of reminding everyone that the company had to keep operating with the speed and ambition of its early years.
For a long time, that system worked.
Amazon innovated fast, executed fast and achieved results that were hard to match.
From the outside, it looked like a practically unstoppable organization.
Until some consequences that were much harder to detect also began to appear.
Over time, they had to focus on how that level of demand affected people and the way teams related to one another.
In 2015, a New York Times article brought part of that internal reality to light.
Employees working under constant pressure, especially tense meetings and cultures where many people felt they couldn’t show vulnerability without it having consequences.
Amazon was an organization full of brilliant profiles and enormously talented teams.
The problem was the way pressure affected the human dynamics within the teams.
People start protecting their decisions more, some meetings become defensive, and conflict stops being managed through collaboration and starts being managed through tension.
And when that happens, the wear within the team starts to grow much faster than it seems.
This doesn’t happen only at Amazon.
It’s common in high-demand environments for tensions and dynamics to appear where pressure ends up eroding the team’s coordination and cohesion.
Pressure doesn’t break teams. The way teams learn to relate to one another under pressure can.
That’s why more and more organizations are starting to pay attention not only to team performance, but also to the quality of the conversations they hold when demands increase.
This week we’re launching the workshop: Cohesion and conflict in high-demand environments.
We’ll work on active-listening tools, constructive conflict resolution, stress management and shared responsibility to improve the way teams face difficult conversations and pressure situations.
The approach is practical and applicable day to day, aimed at improving coordination, cohesion and the quality of the dynamics within demanding teams.
If you’re interested in exploring how to work on this kind of dynamic in your organization, write to me and we’ll look into it.
Do you think pressure improves or damages the way teams relate to one another?
— Berta
